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Posts Tagged ‘unique-visitors’

Newly independent Aol is still struggling with the fate of Bebo, the social network they acquired for $850 million in 2008.

No one argues that Aol overpaid for Bebo. And the social network has fallen from 22 million monthly unique visitors when it was acquired to just 14.6 million today (Comscore worldwide). But even so, Bebo clearly has some value on the open market.

Despite that value, Aol’s best financial option for Bebo will likely be to abandon it rather than sell it, say corporate tax experts we’ve spoken with.

Here’s why – complicated corporate tax rules will let Aol write off the full purchase price of Bebo if they declare it worthless and abandon the asset. With Aol’s effective tax rate of around 45%, that’s $380 million and change in their pocket in taxes that they’d be able to avoid.

A sale of Bebo would almost certainly be less attractive. If someone were to pay them $100 million for the service, which is optimistic, Aol could still offset the remaining $750 million as a tax loss. But it could only apply against long term capital gains, and Aol doesn’t have any to offset against. They’d have to carry that loss forward and hope for future gains to offset it against.

One corporate tax attorney we spoke with wouldn’t discuss Aol specifically, but did confirm the logic of the approach. Bryan Smith, a partner at Perkins Coie, says “Without getting into any specific facts or companies, it will often be more attractive for a U.S. corporation to simply shut down a subsidiary and claim a deduction for the worthlessness of the stock against ordinary income instead of selling the stock at a distressed price and taking a capital loss, which may only offset capital gains.”

If Aol were to abandon Bebo they couldn’t pull any of the assets of the company back into Aol, say the experts we’ve spoken with. Otherwise it becomes a non-taxable liquidation. If Aol had debt or preferred stock on the books with Bebo, though, they could pull out assets to offset that liability.

With the iPad hitting pre-order in two days and shipping in April, it’s important to think about when and why to buy the iPad. Based on our understanding of the product lifecycle and expected moves by Apple’s competitors, we foresee big changes in the ultraportable landscape with the ultraportable/netbook as we now know it mutating - or branching - into a new species of media oriented Win7 and Android devices. Here’s what we can expect.

April 3, 2010 - Big launch. Light crowds at the Apple Store. This isn’t huge-huge. It’s medium-huge and I don’t think you’re going to see an army of the pasty arriving at your local shop clamoring for iPads. This is Apple’s wait and see product, although I don’t doubt between 3-5 million won’t wait and see in 2010.

May-June 2010 - Chinese knock-offs will flood the market and we’ll see a nice collection of weird, mutated slates hitting the more esoteric sites. Nothing major and no big sellers.

Summer 2010 - Dell and HP release their devices. Dell’s is called the Mini 5 AKA the Streak and HP’s as of yet unamed. These guys will wait until the waters have been fully tested before they move with their devices.

Editor’s note: In the following guest post, Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne reveals some of the secrets of using video to help boost the search results rankings of your website. Fliqz is an online video platform.

As most search engine optimization (SEO) experts are aware, getting a first-page Google result is harder than ever. Not only do Google’s search and indexing algorithms continue to evolve in complexity, but Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.

But where problems arise, so do opportunities. Although Google’s newfound enthusiasm for video has created more competition for fewer traditional search results, it has enabled sites with video assets—even sites that would otherwise score poorly in the Google index—to successfully achieve first-page rankings. In fact, Forrester Research found that videos were 53 times more likely than traditional web pages to receive an organic first-page ranking.

Here’s what a blended search result looks like for the search query “777 built in 4 minutes“:

Those images at the top of the search results are video thumbnails, and today, there’s only two ways to get there:

1. Upload your video to YouTube.

The advantage of this is that you are 100% certain to be indexed into Google’s search engine. This does not guarantee you’ll get a first-page result, but at least it ensures that Google knows your content exists.

The drawback, of course, is that anyone who clicks on a YouTube result will be taken to YouTube, which may be fine if your goal is branding (i.e., you only care that people watch your video). If your goal is driving traffic, as is typically the case with SEO, this won’t be a successful strategy.

Your other alternative is:

2. Video SEO

Video SEO is a set of techniques designed to make sure that:

• Google finds your video content
• Google successfully indexes your video content
• Google will display your video content when specific keywords are entered as search terms

Here’s how to make it work:

You Need Video Content

Google is fairly flexible in what it considers to be video content. You can use actual video footage, but screen captures, slide shows, animated PowerPoint slides, and other content will work just as well. Google can’t actually “see” what’s inside the video content, so it relies on title and other meta-data to determine what content your video actually contains.

Submission, Not Discovery

With traditional web pages, Google utilizes crawlers to discover and index web content. Unfortunately, Google can’t read Flash very well (although it is trying), and as a result, most video content is invisible to Google’s search crawlers. Therefore, the best way to appear in Google’s blended search results is to submit your video to Google using a Video Sitemap. This is similar to an XML sitemap, but is formatted specifically for video, and only contains information about your video content. It is submitted using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

The most common error in Video SEO is to assume that because you have submitted the web page on which a video resides, that the video content itself is being indexed.

You’ll also need to make sure that you have a robots.txt file on all video pages, to ensure that Google can easily verify that the locations on the Web you’ve submitted do in fact exist, and that they contain embed codes which indicate the presence of a video.

Title and Title Tags

When ranking videos, Google primarily considers the match between search keywords and the video title. Although Google allows you to submit other meta-data such as description and keywords, these currently don’t have much influence on your search ranking. Google likes it when the title tag of the page matches the title of the video, and will give a higher weighting for results where this is the case.

Video SEO is Long Tail

Like traditional SEO, you’re much more likely to see results with Video SEO if you target more specific, or longer tail, search terms. A video titled “Dog” is unlikely to produce a first-page ranking, while a video titled “German Shepherd Police Dog” will be more likely to score well in Google’s algorithm. Since Google can’t determine the actual content of the video, you might consider submitting the same video multiple times with different titles that match potential search terms.

New and Small Don’t Matter

With traditional SEO, the age of a website is an important consideration for Google in deciding its ranking. Google also considers things like the number of pages on the site, and the number of links to the site, along with the importance of the places those links originate.

In Video SEO, none of this matters. This means that even new sites and small sites can compete on equal footing with larger and more established players. Publishers who are too small or too new to even consider traditional SEO can still be taking advantage of Video SEO opportunities.

For the Foreseeable Future, Video SEO is a Winning Strategy

As time goes by, Google’s discovery and indexing of video content will no doubt become more sophisticated, and as competition for video results increases, it will become harder for sites to achieve these first-page rankings. However, the number of web pages still massively outnumbers indexed video assets, and for as long as that continues, publishers will have an opportunity to jump to the top of Google’s search results through Video SEO.

Eyeblaster, an online advertising firm, has filed for a $115 million IPO according to a recent SEC filing. This is actually Eyeblaster’s second bid for a $115 million IPO — they filed for one at the same price early in 2008, before the IPO market dried up.

The company makes a variety of products, including MediaMind, which is an ad serving and campaign management tool. Last year the company earned $65.1 million in revenue, up from $44.7 million in 2007. The New York-based company was founded in 1999 and has 36 offices around the world.

One thing we love around here at TechCrunch is data. And since we’re busy looking up our own traffic stats for 2009, we thought we might as well share those stats with everyone.

Total unique visitors across all TechCrunch sites in 2009, according to Google Analytics, were 69,482,978, up 55% from 2008’s 45 million unique visitors. Those vistors racked up 228,202,753 page views in 2009, up 90% from 2008’s 120 million page views.

TechCrunch is the largest site in our network, followed by CrunchGear, CrunchBase, MobileCrunch and TechCrunchIT, in that order.

Google search is the single biggest source of traffic, although it decreased from 37.3% in 2008 to 29.6% in 2009. Direct traffic is second, at 24% in 2009 (v. 25.3% in 2008). Then there’s a big drop to Digg (5.1% in 2009, 5.3% in 2008), Google sites (Reader, etc. (3.18% in 2009, 4.2% in 2008) and Twitter (2.9% in 2009, 1.2% in 2008). Feedburner, TechMeme, Facebook and Hacker News rounded out the list of top referrers in 2009.

Traffic so far in 2010 is way, way up on the TechCrunch sites (11.7 million unique visitors so far in 2009). We’ve heard anecdotally from others that traffic has surged in 2010 across most Internet sites. We’ll be digging into that trend shortly, too.

No executive job is safe in Tim Armstrong’s AOL, where he is still cleaning house and putting his own team into place. Even Bill Wilson, the architect of AOL’s let-a thousand-blogs-bloom content strategy which is a cornerstone of AOL’s new approach, is now being replaced as president of AOL Media by Armstrong’s former New York City Google colleague David Eun. “In a turnaround situation we are doing whatever is necessary to make the company successful,” Armstrong told me in a brief phone conversation.

At Google, Eun most recently was in charge of content partnerships for YouTube and Google overall. At AOL, he will be president of AOL Studios as well, which comes from AOL’s recent acquisition of StudioNow. Armstrong expects Eun to bring more video to AOL sites. “You will see an expanded amount of video,” he says, “video we produce ourselves and video partnerships.” In particular, Armstrong wants Eun to “supercharge” content partnerships. Eun will also oversee Seed, AOL’s content management system.

Armstrong says he has no more plans to make more changes to AOL’s top ranks. He’s been putting his own team into place since he took the job, bringing in Brad Garlinghouse as president of Internet and mobile communications to replace longtime exec David Liu and more recently hired former Google engineer Jeff Raynar to head up engineering in New York. At the same time, CTO Ted Cahall and many other vets have departed. And AOL is still in the middle of laying off a third of its workforce, so the executive turmoil might not be over.

Wilson will remain through May. “Bill has done a great job,” says Armstrong, “and I will continue to lean on him.” Wilson was in charge of the AOL homepage and its 80 Mediaglow properties, including Engadget, DownloadSquad, and Joystiq. But the new properties have not grown fast enough to account for the decline in the homepage traffic. AOL’s overall visitor numbers have done pretty much nothing all year, ending at 111 million U.S. unique visitors in December, 2009, versus 110 million a year ago. And that was only after a nice uptick in December (see comScore chart below). “The key metric for our content organization is unique visitor growth,” says Armstrong.

Will Eun do any better? Armstrong sets expectations low, warning that the overall numbers “may show up or down in terms of trading properties in and out,” but that what he will be focussed on is winning audience in the right categories.

Facebook is well on its way to taking Yahoo’s spot as the third largest Web property in the world. (Google and Microsoft are No. 1 and No. 2, respectively). Last summer Facebook took the No. 4 spot globally, displacing AOL, but according to comScore there was still an estimated 241 million unique visitors a month separating it from the No. 3 site, Yahoo. In December, 2009, that gap narrowed to 125 million unique visitors globally. (That was also the same month Facebook passed AOL in the U.S. to take the No. 4 spot domestically).

In December, 2009, Facebook attracted 469 million unique visitors, up an incredible 31 million visitors from the month before. To put that in perspective, in a single month Facebook gained as many new visitors as Yahoo did all year. That one-month gain was also the equivalent of adding as many people as all of Digg or half of Twitter.com. Meanwhile, Yahoo lost 7 million unique visitors from November to December to end the year at 594 million unique visitors. (In the U.S., Yahoo is a stronger No. 2 after Google, with 161 million uniques in December, compared to 173 million for Google, 138 million for Microsoft, and 112 Million for Facebook).

These numbers are different than the 350 million registered users Facebook itself counts, half of which come every day. ComScore estimates total traffic, which is larger than the number of reported registered users (you don’t have to be a Facebook member to visit a public page). And these are estimates, remember that. And they don’t include the 60 million people a month who log into other sites via Facebook Connect.

For the year, Facebook grew by nearly 250 million uniques. Repeating that will be difficult in 2010, but even if it slows to half that pace and Yahoo remains stagnant, Facebook could overpass Yahoo within a year to become the third largest site in the world, all without even necessarily going public. Passing Microsoft (No. 2) or Google (No. 1) in unique visitors will take a little longer. Microsoft’s sites ended the year with 727 million uniques worldwide (up 80 million), while Google’s attracted 899 million in December (up 123 million).

By other measures, Facebook is already larger than both Yahoo and Microsoft. Its pageviews grew 141 percent last year to 193 billion in December, nearly double Yahoo’s 100 billion (down 2 percent) and Microsoft’s 109 billion (up 54 percent). Google is still the largest pageview generator with 274 billion a month (up 35 percent). Yahoo has simply lost its zip. At least Microsoft and Google are still showing respectable growth for their size. But it is not too hard to imagine Facebook catching up to Google here as well (see chart below). Facebook also beats Yahoo in terms of total minutes spent on the site (116 million versus 101 million) and average minutes per visitor (247 minutes a month versus 170 for Yahoo).

The Silicon Valley Association of Startup Entrepreneurs (aka SVASE) has set up a new seed funding program for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in conjunction with newly established early-stage investment firm Cambridge West Ventures.

On the East Coast, meanwhile, things are in motion too, with the introduction of a new seed startup fund dubbed IA Venture Strategies that was founded by New York angel investor Roger Ehrenberg.

SVASE and Cambridge West Ventures are looking to connect with startups and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, and have developed a program apt for very early-stage companies. Selected startups are eligible for up to $50,000 in venture capital in return for an unspecified ‘modest stake’ and deferred legal costs up to $15,000 from certain law firms from the region.

The program also includes access to Sun Microsystems and Microsoft startup programs for software and hardware related support, as well as access to all SVASE events for 6 months and its network of VCs, attorneys and other useful partners.

More info is available on the SVASE website.

As for NYC-based IA Venture Strategies, this is a seed fund established by Roger Ehrenberg, a Wall Street vet that has been advising and operating dozens of early-stage companies across the financial technology, digital media and asset management sectors over the past few years. In an interview with peHUB’s Dan Primack, Ehrenberg disclosed that he’s raising up to $25 million for his new fund, and that he will focus on “big data” startups and invest seed capital up to $750k in each of them.

More info about the new seed fund here, and for an overview of what’s going on in the Big Apple, check out Chris Dixon’s take on the news.

Over the weekend at the MidemNet music event in Cannes, MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta took the stage to talk about the current status of the struggling company. During his keynote interview with Billboard editorial director Bill Werde, Van Natta stated that MySpace was showing an increase in unique visitors for the first time since the middle of last year. In fact, Van Natta said that according to comScore data, MySpace visitors grew by 7 percent between November and December. That may sound like great news for the site, but it may be misleading: many of these new users may have simply been redirected users of Imeem.

MySpace completed its acquisition of Imeem on December 8, and the music service was promptly shut down (Imeem was out of money and its music licenses were expiring). As soon as Imeem shut down, MySpace redirected all of its traffic to its own music site.  Now, we can’t tell exactly how many users MySpace gained from these redirects, but according to comScore MySpace saw a jump in 4.7 million unique visitors in December, which is about the same as what comScore was measuring for Imeem in previous months (it had 4.6M in October and 4.4M in November).  Again, we can’t definitively say how much of MySpace’s growth was due to Imeem, but it’s likely that it represented a substantial portion of it.

To be fair, Van Natta and MySpace aren’t exactly out boasting about their improved traffic stats — Van Natta’s comment was in response to a question that was posed to him on stage, and he followed it up by saying, “We don’t want to get ahead of ourselves here but it’s good that the numbers have stabilized and we hope this will continue”.

It’s worth pointing out that while MySpace’s uniques have stabilized after big drops last spring and summer, it’s unclear if the number of page views the site receives has stabilized (see the comScore graph below).

Twitter’s international traffic continues to flatten as the microblogging site’s number of unique visitors flattened in November. Twitter saw 60.3 million unique visitors in November compared to 58.3 million unique visitors in October. Though the site saw a rise of 2 million visits globally, this slight uptick in visitors only represents a 3.5 percent increase in traffic. Twitter’s November U.S. traffic has stalled as well; U.S. traffic rose by a little over 100,000 visitors, to 19.37 million unique visitors after seeing a 8 percent decline in traffic in October.

Over the past few months, Twitter has rolled out versions in Spanish, German, French and Italian which could help boost the international use of its site. But as traffic stalls on Twitter’s homepage, third party Twitter clients like Seesmic and Tweetdeck are growing like gangbusters.

CEO Evan Williams acknowledged Twitter’s stall in growth but said that new features of the site could jumpstart growth in traffic, including the Retweet button, Lists, and Geolocation features.

Of course, many of these features have been added to the third-party Twitter clients, which easily account for half of all Twitter usage.

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